Angry Corner

Al-Akhbar is currently going through a transitional phase whereby the English website is available for Archival purposes only. All new content will be published in Arabic on the main website (www.al-akhbar.com).

If you want to know about Nasrallah’s speech, you need to read Anne Barnard’s analysis. While she does not know a word of Arabic, and while she has never studied the Middle East, and while she can’t watch the speech herself, she has Arabic-speakers among her staff in Beirut, and they are March 14 enthusiasts. And if you want to read a distorted view of the speech filtered through the prism of Israeli propaganda interests, Anne Barnard is the person to read.

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It is a pity that people in Lebanon can’t criticize their president in Lebanese publications without worrying about legal repercussions. This man, Suleiman, started his term with charges against people who criticized him and mocked him on Facebook.

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Think about it: only a year ago, the Western press was filled with articles declaring the rise of Qatari power: article upon article was devoted to the news of the power of Qatar in the Arab world and how its government and al-Jazeera are now the voice of the “Arab Spring.” Hamad bin Jasim basically led meetings of the Arab League while other ministers sat silently or nodded their heads. Al-Jazeera, during the Egyptian uprising of 2011, was declared the voice of the Arab youth. How much things have changed in the course of a year or two.

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There has been an unprecedented campaign of festive coverage in the Western (and paid oil and gas Arab) media for the ascension of a new emir for Qatar. The event is treated (especially but not exclusively in Qatari-paid media) as part of the supposed march of the “Arab Spring.” Little mention is made to the history of Gulf dynasties in which a brother surrenders power to another brother, or a father to a son. For some reason, the abdication of the unelected emir – an absolute ruler – to another unelected emir – an absolute ruler – is treated bizarrely as a democratic event.

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Events and developments in Lebanon often conceal or reveal the roles of outside powers. The sudden dramatic rise of the Salafi movement in the last few years in Lebanon is the product of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) funding and manipulation. The sectarian anti-Shia campaign that was unleashed by the House of Saud (and later by Qatar’s House of Thani) required the use and proliferation of various sectarian Salafi voices and clerics. This is why the Saudi (US-approved) campaign to mobilize and agitate the entire Arab region along sectarian lines, had its risks.

Zionists are furious that Arabs focus on foreign policy and evaluate politicians in their countries through the prism of foreign policy. They want the Arab people to be as ill-informed and as ignorant of world affairs as the American public. That, of course, suits Zionism. The ignorance of the American public facilitates the operation by which the Zionist lobby imposes its will on Capitol Hill (with the full cooperation and consent of US presidents).

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The spying scandal by the US government, which was exposed by Glenn Greenwald, is only surprising in its scale. The National Security State is an old phenomenon and Europeans were at one point alarmed by ECHELON, which was also run by the National Security Agency (it is a testimony to the success and penetration of the NSA that most Americans have never heard of it, and its very existence was a state secret only years ago). The revelation is a big scandal, but it is unlikely to produce coverage similar in scale to that of the Lewinsky or Iran-Contra scandals.

I read this glowing profile of Henry Jessup in the mouthpiece of the American University of Beirut, Main Gate. This sentence struck me: "Jessup routinely aligned himself with some of the more conservative members of the SPC [Syrian Protestant College] faculty and administration on many issues."